One cheesy tactic is knowing ahead of time how many enemies are in a spot, and luring them out 1 by 1 to make the fight easier. It's perfectly within the rules, but in the "real world" of the game the characters wouldn't know to do that.
But you might well have scouted ahead, invisible or stealthed, in which case your party would indeed know what to expect, and drawing enemies out piecemeal would then be a natural tactic for them to attempt, not cheesiness.
The problem with the game mechanics, of course, is that the game engine doesn't have a way of knowing whether you've legitimately scouted ahead or are cheesily metagaming. Changing the engine to track this is probably possible in theory, but it'd be a major job - you'd probably have to code it by having a second (invisible and time-based) "fog of war" to track whether you'd scouted an area sufficiently recently, and so on - far too much trouble to implement, I suspect.
I suppose the ultimately "legitimate" method is simply to stand toe-to-toe and slug it out in melee.
I haven't tested this, but I'd have thought it should be just about possible, if you avoided him until almost the end of the game, then went back to his area with a maxed-out warrior-heavy party, with all the best equipment and fully buffed. He hits hard and fast, but he'd still miss a lot of his swings against a well-protected party, and you'd have him outnumbered, so you'd be hitting him quite a lot too. If you were lucky and got a couple of good crits in, then he might go down before he'd killed you all. Probably not reliably, but I reckon it ought to work sometimes.
Of course that's not very useful even if it worked, because you'd already have played almost the whole game without getting his armour, which is the main point of killing him. But has anyone here tested this as an experiment?
Given Drizzt's fairly ridiculous stats, trying to "slug it out in melee", as you put it, is going to be a grueling experience. At least if it's done in a "fair" manner, or what most cheese-criers consider fair. Drizzt's high APR and low THAC0 mean that he will hit even max-level warriors fairly easily and fairly often, unless you take measures of some kind to protect yourself, which is often where cheese-territory begins.
I'm not saying it can't be done, of course. But given that some people consider even the mere class combination of Ranger/Cleric to be cheese, not to mention the actual tactics/spell combinations you are likely to employ, who is to say what is actually "fair"? Why is ranged combat not legitimate?
I don't have the spell description handy, but unless it specifically states that it is meant to bypass MR, I'm pretty comfortable calling this one a bug.
It doesn't say "bypasses MR". However, it does say "An opponent that hits the caster with any weapons or spells within this radius suffers 1d8+2 points of fire damage" (or "1d8+2 cold damage" in the case of Fireshield (Blue)). Since it says "suffers" without qualification, not "suffers subject to possible resistances" or "might suffer up to", then this could be read as meaning that it is indeed intended to ignore MR and only be blocked by a more specific resistance (i.e. FR or CR as appropriate).
Of course I accept that it doesn't have to be interpreted that way, but I reckon it's at least arguable that ignoring MR is intended. Furthermore, since FR and CR ought to be successfully protecting the attacker from Fireshields, I do lean towards the view that the designers probably didn't intend that MR would also protect the attacker as well as FR or CR.
Either way, I think we can probably agree that the spell description ought to make clearer what is intended, and of course the game then ought to implement that, whichever it is.
There has to be a line drawn somewhere. MR should not protect you from everything. Should it protect you from a Flame Blade or the Black Blade of Disaster, too? I don't think so.
I agree that MR wasn't invented as a blanket protection against everything, and in particular I agree that it was surely never intended to block magical weapons. However, I do think it could be made a lot clearer what it is and isn't meant to cover. Overhaul have certainly clarified quite a few spell descriptions, but there's a lot which remains ambiguous.
Again I accept that there is plenty of room for differing opinions, but I reckon that the general principle should be that when a spell does some other specific form of damage (e.g. fire), then it is the relevant specific resistance (e.g. fire resistance) which ought to be the protection, and MR ought to be the protection for all other cases (which is actually most cases) where there isn't some more specific protection to apply. So MR would be your protection against Charm, and Hold, and Confusion, and so on, but FR would be your protection against Fireballs and ER would be your protection against Lightning Bolts, and so on. However, I realise that this is definitely not how it works at the moment (and probably isn't quite what the original designers intended). Actually, I'm not entirely convinced that even the original designers themselves had an entirely clear idea of what was or wasn't meant to be covered, since the range of possible magical effects has expanded over the decades to include things which didn't exist when MR was invented ... but I could certainly be wrong about that.
It doesn't say "bypasses MR". However, it does say "An opponent that hits the caster with any weapons or spells within this radius suffers 1d8+2 points of fire damage" (or "1d8+2 cold damage" in the case of Fireshield (Blue)). Since it says "suffers" without qualification, not "suffers subject to possible resistances" or "might suffer up to", then this could be read as meaning that it is indeed intended to ignore MR and only be blocked by a more specific resistance (i.e. FR or CR as appropriate).
That's how most spells are worded. Fireball doesn't say "deals X damage, subject to resistances" either. The only spells I can remember to actually mention MR at all are "protection-removals", i.e. stuff like Pierce Magic and friends.
Also, there is an important difference between specific resistances and magic resistance that is relevant to this discussion: specific resistance protects against non-magical sources of damage. It doesn't matter if you get hit by a fireball, or if you stand in a pool of lava - your fire resistance will protect you.
No, no, no, please not the same discussion all over again, we've all read it already! :-)
Of course ranged combat is perfectly legitimate. However, at range you get the possibility of kiting, which I personally reckon is what a sensible being would "really do" in appropriate situations (and therefore isn't cheese), but some people would regard as cheesy. I'm suggesting toe-to-toe melee simply because I'm trying to imagine what situation is most inarguably not a cheesy tactic in the minds of as many players as possible.
Of course there's always someone somewhere who can argue that anything you care to name is cheesy, but casting some buffs and then chopping at the target with melee weapons seems to me like the situation where the maximum number could agree that it's a "proper" fight. And it'd be interesting to know if anyone has demonstrably defeated Drizzt in such a plain-vanilla fashion.
But... you say you like MR in its current implementation, but then say it shouldn't work the way the current implementation is described. It should protect from magical spells and effects - including the Fire Shield, Cure Wounds, and magical effects caused by enchanted weapons. That doesn't mean it should block damage from a Sword +2 (which is physical damage after all) or from, say, the Gnasher club, or from an Oil of Flame (which is like a Molotov Cocktail).
Or, have MR block magical effects but NOT damage - fire is still hot even if it's magical, right? So, let Fire Shield through... and also let Fireball and Acid Arrow and Flame Bolt and Horrid Wilting through. (And still block Cure Wounds.) I'm just saying, decide what the rule is and apply it in a uniform, common-sense way.
I'd say it is uniform. MR applies to being attacked by a spell, as in an effect generated by magic words or a wand like a fireball or hold person. It shouldn't protect you from things made by spells that are themselves not spells, and it doesn't. With Flame Blade you create a sword made of fire with a spell that is safe for you to handle. The sword is magical, but not a spell, like any +1 sword. The fact that it does magical fire damage instead of physical damage is immaterial.
The more I think about it, the more I think this is actually the better direction to go. Fire is still hot, isle is still cold, poison is still poisonous. Balance things by having most spells that cause physical damage bypass MR (not MM though, that's purely magical) - there are, after all, other resistances that cover most kinds of damage. Turn MR into a more limited protection against magical status effects.
That would be interesting.
It'd make fights against Drow a bit less boring, too, since you'd have more good options than just summoning.
I agree about the damage from the sword, but I think I've seen a time or three where MR blocked the fire damage from said sword. Same with Varscona vs Flesh Golemns.
I could be wrong, I'll have to check if it's immune or MR. Pretty sure it's MR.
The more I think about it, the more I think this is actually the better direction to go. Fire is still hot, isle is still cold, poison is still poisonous. Balance things by having most spells that cause physical damage bypass MR (not MM though, that's purely magical) - there are, after all, other resistances that cover most kinds of damage. Turn MR into a more limited protection against magical status effects.
Yes, I think that's essentially the same as the way I also suggested that it ought to work.
That's how most spells are worded. Fireball doesn't say "deals X damage, subject to resistances" either. The only spells I can remember to actually mention MR at all are "protection-removals", i.e. stuff like Pierce Magic and friends.
Yes, and that's why it can be argued either way, the real intention is not crystal-clear in many cases.
Also, there is an important difference between specific resistances and magic resistance that is relevant to this discussion: specific resistance protects against non-magical sources of damage. It doesn't matter if you get hit by a fireball, or if you stand in a pool of lava - your fire resistance will protect you.
True, but I'm not quite sure what conclusion you're suggesting. I reckon a resistance ought to apply to the effect you're experiencing, not to whatever may have caused it to happen.
Thus if the effect that you're trying to resist is (for example) fire, then I reckon it makes sense that the relevant resistance ought to be your Fire Resistance, no matter what caused the fire. Similarly, my point is that Magic Resistance ought to be about resisting a magical effect (such as enchantment) but not about resisting a non-magical effect (such as fire) because that'd mean double-counting with (or over-riding of) your Fire Resistance. Are we disagreeing about that, I'm not sure?
You are right that it would make sense if it was like that; it's not, though. I was merely pointing out the distinction, which is important to keep in mind. The whole "magical nature" issue of spell effects in general is a tricky, complex thing; especially given that there is, in fact, an elemental-resistance equivalent for non-elemental spell damage in "resistance to magical damage" (which works like e.g. fire resistance).
I agree that magic resistance is weird in how it works, and generally very powerful in BG. Short of overhauling the entire resistance system though, I'm not sure how it could be fixed.
Also keep in mind please that I am in no way versed in how PnP works, and how important all these in-depth distinctions are for spell casting in PnP. Given that every spell comes with like two pages of text to explain every detail, it may very well be that the whole "magical nature" vs. "non-magic nature" of spell effects is actually important, and merely suffers from the reduced complexity of the BG-implementation.
I agree about the damage from the sword, but I think I've seen a time or three where MR blocked the fire damage from said sword. Same with Varscona vs Flesh Golemns.
I could be wrong, I'll have to check if it's immune or MR. Pretty sure it's MR.
Pretty sure that's just damage immunity. I've never seen MR affect the on-hit effects of weapons.
I agree about the damage from the sword, but I think I've seen a time or three where MR blocked the fire damage from said sword. Same with Varscona vs Flesh Golemns.
I could be wrong, I'll have to check if it's immune or MR. Pretty sure it's MR.
Pretty sure that's just damage immunity. I've never seen MR affect the on-hit effects of weapons.
According to NI, Varscona's cold damage is affected by MR. I'm pretty sure it also affects some of the on-hit effects of magical ammunition, like the extra damage of Acid Arrows.
@TJ_Hooker Just tested it by having Shar-Teel slap Viconia around a little, and you're right. Varscona's cold damage can be blocked by magic resist. This strikes me as erroneous and should be patched.
@TJ_Hooker Just tested it by having Shar-Teel slap Viconia around a little, and you're right. Varscona's cold damage can be blocked by magic resist. This strikes me as erroneous and should be patched.
There is another word I pick up in the forum. "Power-gaming". Does that refer to something like Grinding for awhile on Syrine Beach, [rest- slay Syrines, rest- slay Respawned Syrines, etc] so as to regain Imoen's Thief skills ASAP after she Duals to Mage. In a way, that is also taking advantage of a Game Mechanic so 'cheesy' perhaps rather than story-driven.
Power-Gaming usually just refers to playing in a way that maximises power, often at the expense of more nebulous things (like RP value). Obvious examples would be picking 'Teh Most Powerful class' simply because it is the most powerful class. Another, perhaps lesser example, is doing things like maximising those stats that have a tangible impact while minimising those that don't. For example, 18/18/18/3/3/18 on a human Fighter, since having the INT and WIS of an unripe banana doesn't actually translate into any actual gameplay disadvantage. Rolling for hours for a high stat total would likely also count. Metagaming often occurs simultaneously, such as when playing an 'evil' character but taking the good solution to a quest because you know it gives you better rewards (or vice-versa).
I'm sure someone more knowledgeable than I can give you an expert rundown of the history of the term. It probably comes from MMOs.
"Power-Gaming" refers to a style of playing that is concerned only with one thing, power, to the point of completely disregarding all other aspects of the game. What this means concretely is dependent on the game itself. In BG, it means focusing exclusively on combat performance, while disregarding everything else (alignments, roleplaying decisions, romance, etc.). The aforementioned "min-maxing" is an integral part of power-gaming; it refers to maximizing every relevant statistic, while completely ignoring the irrelevant ones, often to the point of absurdity (like the 3 INT 3 WIS 3 CHA fighter). Power-gaming does not necessarily have to be cheese, but often power-gamers will readily employ it. Note that power-gaming doesn't mean actual cheating; it means getting the absolute most out of everything legitimately possible, even if it doesn't make sense or fit the "spirit" of the game. Power-gamers are often a reason why we can't have nice things.
A) spare me the "you drunk the potions in front of him, that's so lame!" story: it could have been done out of his sight. Plus, I demonstrated they are not even necessary.
funny that none ever complained about how the Fire Shields worked, before I killed a famous drow with 98% MR in this way.
C) don't blame players for the poor npc AI. That's the reason why SCS is so popular.
D) try to find a new way to kill him after 10 years and then we'll talk about "cheese tactics".
Not for no reason, it was done to compensate for him being "stupid" due to being AI controlled. Not the most elegant solution, of course, but he'd be a joke with less stats.
The mechanics of how the rolls work are a bit different in 4ED (which is what the wiki relates to) but the general principles about what magic resistance effects are the same as 2ED (the mechanics change from 2ED is that in 2ED it was a percentage roll for the recipient and the caster level had no influence on the roll)
In short it should protect against most spells that do direct damage, regardless of whether that damage type is magical, poison, fire, etc. It generally won't protect against a creature/item summoned by a spell.
- the "Bunny Bomb": using Wish, create a massive swarm of bunnies (I wish for a Horde to overrun my enemies...), then use Wish again to cast Abi-Dhalzim's Horrid Wilting on every unit on the map; the result is a MASSIVE amount of Wiltings that kill everything in sight, often including the game itself (due to graphics overload).
Is it just me, or is that the most awesome idea ever?
- the "Bunny Bomb": using Wish, create a massive swarm of bunnies (I wish for a Horde to overrun my enemies...), then use Wish again to cast Abi-Dhalzim's Horrid Wilting on every unit on the map; the result is a MASSIVE amount of Wiltings that kill everything in sight, often including the game itself (due to graphics overload).
Is it just me, or is that the most awesome idea ever?
Drizzt was made stupid-overpowered by Bioware for basically no reason, anyway, so I can forgive any "cheese" used to kill him.
Actually, Drizzt was made stupid-overpowered by RA Salvatore. A Drizzt Sue.
Drizzt only seems overpowered because he's a level 16 character going up against hordes of level 3 orcs. R.A. Salvatore is just a crappy DM. In-game, Drizzt should be just barely more powerful than Sarevok. Instead, Bioware made him nigh unkillable.
Comments
The problem with the game mechanics, of course, is that the game engine doesn't have a way of knowing whether you've legitimately scouted ahead or are cheesily metagaming. Changing the engine to track this is probably possible in theory, but it'd be a major job - you'd probably have to code it by having a second (invisible and time-based) "fog of war" to track whether you'd scouted an area sufficiently recently, and so on - far too much trouble to implement, I suspect.
I haven't tested this, but I'd have thought it should be just about possible, if you avoided him until almost the end of the game, then went back to his area with a maxed-out warrior-heavy party, with all the best equipment and fully buffed. He hits hard and fast, but he'd still miss a lot of his swings against a well-protected party, and you'd have him outnumbered, so you'd be hitting him quite a lot too. If you were lucky and got a couple of good crits in, then he might go down before he'd killed you all. Probably not reliably, but I reckon it ought to work sometimes.
Of course that's not very useful even if it worked, because you'd already have played almost the whole game without getting his armour, which is the main point of killing him. But has anyone here tested this as an experiment?
I'm not saying it can't be done, of course. But given that some people consider even the mere class combination of Ranger/Cleric to be cheese, not to mention the actual tactics/spell combinations you are likely to employ, who is to say what is actually "fair"? Why is ranged combat not legitimate?
Oh well, the same discussion all over again.
Of course I accept that it doesn't have to be interpreted that way, but I reckon it's at least arguable that ignoring MR is intended. Furthermore, since FR and CR ought to be successfully protecting the attacker from Fireshields, I do lean towards the view that the designers probably didn't intend that MR would also protect the attacker as well as FR or CR.
Either way, I think we can probably agree that the spell description ought to make clearer what is intended, and of course the game then ought to implement that, whichever it is. I agree that MR wasn't invented as a blanket protection against everything, and in particular I agree that it was surely never intended to block magical weapons. However, I do think it could be made a lot clearer what it is and isn't meant to cover. Overhaul have certainly clarified quite a few spell descriptions, but there's a lot which remains ambiguous.
Again I accept that there is plenty of room for differing opinions, but I reckon that the general principle should be that when a spell does some other specific form of damage (e.g. fire), then it is the relevant specific resistance (e.g. fire resistance) which ought to be the protection, and MR ought to be the protection for all other cases (which is actually most cases) where there isn't some more specific protection to apply. So MR would be your protection against Charm, and Hold, and Confusion, and so on, but FR would be your protection against Fireballs and ER would be your protection against Lightning Bolts, and so on. However, I realise that this is definitely not how it works at the moment (and probably isn't quite what the original designers intended). Actually, I'm not entirely convinced that even the original designers themselves had an entirely clear idea of what was or wasn't meant to be covered, since the range of possible magical effects has expanded over the decades to include things which didn't exist when MR was invented ... but I could certainly be wrong about that.
Also, there is an important difference between specific resistances and magic resistance that is relevant to this discussion: specific resistance protects against non-magical sources of damage. It doesn't matter if you get hit by a fireball, or if you stand in a pool of lava - your fire resistance will protect you.
Of course ranged combat is perfectly legitimate. However, at range you get the possibility of kiting, which I personally reckon is what a sensible being would "really do" in appropriate situations (and therefore isn't cheese), but some people would regard as cheesy. I'm suggesting toe-to-toe melee simply because I'm trying to imagine what situation is most inarguably not a cheesy tactic in the minds of as many players as possible.
Of course there's always someone somewhere who can argue that anything you care to name is cheesy, but casting some buffs and then chopping at the target with melee weapons seems to me like the situation where the maximum number could agree that it's a "proper" fight. And it'd be interesting to know if anyone has demonstrably defeated Drizzt in such a plain-vanilla fashion.
It'd make fights against Drow a bit less boring, too, since you'd have more good options than just summoning.
I agree about the damage from the sword, but I think I've seen a time or three where MR blocked the fire damage from said sword. Same with Varscona vs Flesh Golemns.
I could be wrong, I'll have to check if it's immune or MR. Pretty sure it's MR.
Thus if the effect that you're trying to resist is (for example) fire, then I reckon it makes sense that the relevant resistance ought to be your Fire Resistance, no matter what caused the fire. Similarly, my point is that Magic Resistance ought to be about resisting a magical effect (such as enchantment) but not about resisting a non-magical effect (such as fire) because that'd mean double-counting with (or over-riding of) your Fire Resistance. Are we disagreeing about that, I'm not sure?
I agree that magic resistance is weird in how it works, and generally very powerful in BG. Short of overhauling the entire resistance system though, I'm not sure how it could be fixed.
Also keep in mind please that I am in no way versed in how PnP works, and how important all these in-depth distinctions are for spell casting in PnP. Given that every spell comes with like two pages of text to explain every detail, it may very well be that the whole "magical nature" vs. "non-magic nature" of spell effects is actually important, and merely suffers from the reduced complexity of the BG-implementation.
Just tested it by having Shar-Teel slap Viconia around a little, and you're right. Varscona's cold damage can be blocked by magic resist. This strikes me as erroneous and should be patched.
I'm sure someone more knowledgeable than I can give you an expert rundown of the history of the term. It probably comes from MMOs.
Just a few thoughts:
A) spare me the "you drunk the potions in front of him, that's so lame!" story: it could have been done out of his sight. Plus, I demonstrated they are not even necessary.
C) don't blame players for the poor npc AI. That's the reason why SCS is so popular.
D) try to find a new way to kill him after 10 years and then we'll talk about "cheese tactics".
E) Y U MAD?
The mechanics of how the rolls work are a bit different in 4ED (which is what the wiki relates to) but the general principles about what magic resistance effects are the same as 2ED (the mechanics change from 2ED is that in 2ED it was a percentage roll for the recipient and the caster level had no influence on the roll)
In short it should protect against most spells that do direct damage, regardless of whether that damage type is magical, poison, fire, etc. It generally won't protect against a creature/item summoned by a spell.
I'd like to see them duke it out, though the fight is heavily on Drizzt's side.